The cat was already on Sam’s veranda when she arrived, sitting by Sam’s chair, accepting homage from his fingers.
‘Traitor,’ Meg told the cat, and Sam shook his head.
‘No way! He’s just pre-empting your next move—shifting in with me.’
Her heart leapt. Living with Sam? Talk about dreams and fantasies coming true!
Caution suggested she think it through, so she didn’t reply, instead sitting down in one of the low-slung chairs and accepting the glass of cold wine he handed her.
He’d pulled the chairs close together so they sat shoulder to shoulder, and his free hand, cool from holding her glass, came to rest on her knee.
‘I have the answer,’ he declared, looking not at her but out across the Bay. ‘If you really don’t mind not starting university again for another year, that would give me time to get the new hospital up and running here, put in good staff, a medical administrator, look at other projects my manager can work on, like accommodation for old people and a shelter of some kind for the young ones, then we’ll both go to Brisbane and I’ll get a job down there while you study. I could even work part time and do a house-husband thing so you’re not stressed out with study and the house stuff.’
Now he looked at her, his face alight with the simplicity of it all, his smile declaring it was a done deal—for why wouldn’t she go along with it?
Meg gulped her drink, mentally berating herself for not telling the truth in the first place—but how could she have explained the love thing when she didn’t understand it herself?
How to kill his hopes?
She took another gulp of wine and, seeing her glass almost at the empty stage, Sam got up, without the chair entangling him, and went to fetch the bottle.
She waved it away, knowing all the wine in the world wouldn’t help.
‘The plan was only part of it,’ she began, as Sam sat down again beside her—but didn’t put his hand on her knee.
‘The rest?’
She turned to him, searching his face, hoping to see a glimmer of understanding though she knew that would be impossible, for what had she given him to understand?
But maybe he did understand, for he took her hand and held it between both of his.
‘Is it to do with having children? I could understand that, Meg. You lost Lucy and might not want to risk facing that pain again.’
‘No, Sam, it’s not children. I’d love to have children—three or four—comes of being an only child myself, I guess. I know I’m leaving things late but, no, it’s not to do with kids.’ This part at least she could answer honestly, and she knew he’d hear the truth in her words.
‘It’s to do with love,’ she finally admitted. ‘I can’t explain it clearly because it’s very mixed-up in my mind, but I married Charles without loving him—not loving him the way I knew I should, with a love that would carry us both through the very toughest times, that would let us fight and yet still love, go through death and yet still love. It wasn’t the kind of love that would stand up against the tests life throws at you. The deep-down, in the bones and muscle and sinew kind of love.’
‘And you don’t feel that kind of love for me?’
Sam spoke so softly Meg barely heard the words, and in a tree across the Esplanade a kookaburra laughed—uproariously.
She knew she should answer the question but answering it honestly would give Sam too much power. He’d take her love and use it as a weapon to push for marriage.
‘I don’t think you feel it, Sam,’ she said at last. ‘Oh, I know you love me—in the way you’ve always loved me. Meg the friend, and now Meg the lover. This other love—the love I need—is more than that. But it’s the kind of love that takes up so much space it leaves you vulnerable, and that’s the one thing you’ve always hated feeling—the one thing you’ve always been on guard against.’
He stood up again, filled her glass and walked away, through to the kitchen to put the wine back in the refrigerator, she assumed, and when he returned it was as if the conversation hadn’t happened.
‘I bought a couple of steaks on the way home. I’ll cook you dinner. Veggies or salad with your steak?’
Her heart raced—was that it? Was that all he had to say?
‘Salad, thanks,’ she managed, damned if he was going to get away with playing cool all on his own. She put down her glass so she wouldn’t spill the wine and clambered out of the chair, picking up the glass and following him into the kitchen.
‘Can I help?’
He turned and smiled.
‘In those shorts you’re more of a distraction than a help, but if you want a job, you can pick out what you’d like in a salad in the fridge. I’ve some pears and soft blue cheese in there somewhere—they go well together.’
Sure they did!
Meg forgot the cool, set down her drink so she couldn’t throw it at him, folded her arms and let fly.
‘That’s it? I open up my heart to you and suddenly we’re talking about pears and blue cheese in a salad?’
‘Soft blue cheese,’ Sam corrected. ‘I don’t think hard blue goes nearly as well with it. Gorgonzola is the best, but it doesn’t seem to find its way to the Bay.’
Meg was sorry she’d put down her drink.
‘I don’t want to talk about cheese!’ she stormed.
‘And I don’t want to talk about love. Not right now, and definitely not with you all steamed up the way you are. I thought an intelligent woman like you might have figured that out.’
He turned from the stove where he’d set a ridged griddle over a high gas flame.
‘I need to think about what you said, Meg. You’ve obviously been thinking about it, so can’t you allow me to do the same? Yes, some of what you said rang bells but not knowing love—or how to love? Harsh judgements, Megan.’
Hurtful judgements, she realised now. Very hurtful.
She moved towards him, putting her arms around him from behind, while he dropped the steaks onto the heated griddle.
‘I told you I was muddled,’ she whispered. ‘I spoke to try to sort my thoughts, not to hurt you.’
He moved within her grasp, holding her in return and bending his head to kiss her on the lips.
‘I need to think about it,’ he repeated. ‘Heaven forbid I should cause you more pain than I’ve already caused in your life, Megan.’
Another kiss then he walked her backwards across the kitchen to where she’d left her wine.
‘Have a drink while I rescue the steaks and nuke a couple of potatoes,’ he said, then he smiled. ‘You’ll need your strength seeing as I took you up on the affair option last night. No need for us to forgo that pleasure!’
Wasn’t there?
When every night she spent in Sam’s arms would weaken her resolve?
How could she have been so stupid as to have suggested it?
How could she not have known that making love with Sam would mean so much?
CHAPTER TEN
MELODY CARTER went into true labour two days later. The baby girl was tiny but apart from that didn’t show any of the signs of prematurity. She gave her first cry spontaneously, breathed for herself with no sign of respiratory distress, had no difficulty feeding or passing urine. And though she was slightly jaundiced, Dr Chan, who examined her at birth, suggested she was closer to full term—maybe thirty-six or thirty-seven weeks gestational age.
Melody was a long way from recovery to her addiction, but she was following the regimen laid out for her, and she admitted she could have been wrong about the date of the baby’s conception.
Meg refused to think of all the reasons that could be offered for this confusion, concentrating instead on the girl herself, and the tiny daughter Melody was doubtful about accepting.
Mrs Carter was equally doubtful.
‘She sees herself having to bring the baby up if Melody gets back on drugs,’ Sam said, coming into the nursery to find Meg cuddling the fretful baby.
Her low birth weight could e
xplain her poor sleeping habits but the paediatrician had warned them it was likely to be foetal alcohol syndrome.
Meg smiled at Sam—not in agreement but because, after a weekend of loving, it had become something she couldn’t control. See Sam, smile—easy as that. And it was getting harder to control the other reactions she had to seeing Sam—the pleasurable ache inside her body, the flush of heat remembering brought, the skittering of excitement across her skin.
‘You can see her point,’ she managed to reply, probably far too late for his smile had broadened. Having an affair with a colleague was proving every bit as difficult as she’d imagined it would be, but though earlier that morning he’d tempted her with the store-cupboard suggestion, they hadn’t, as yet, had to resort to it—the nights brought loving enough.
‘You getting clucky?’
He nodded to the baby in her arms, and she knew he was thinking her desire for a baby might outweigh what he claimed was her unrealistic attitude to love.
Oh, he’d thought about what she’d said, but argued she was wrong—his love for Meg had held through thirteen years apart—of course it would hold through anything life would throw at them.
Meg studied him as he took the tiny girl—unnamed because of the doubt Melody still felt. He examined her very gently and soothed her fretful cries with his fingertip across her temple.
Yes, she was getting clucky, Meg realised. Almost clucky enough to give up the dream…
But clucky enough to live without the love she needed?
Tough question.
Sam settled the baby in its crib, his arm aching with a need to stretch it around Meg’s waist, his body yearning for them to be standing arm in arm by the crib of their own child.
Damn the hospital grapevine. He put his arm around her waist and drew her close.
‘I do love you,’ he murmured, and she turned and flashed the smile that made his heart stand still.
‘I know you do,’ she acknowledged, and Sam knew they’d moved to another place in their relationship. A place where getting married might be closer.
But it was his insistence on marriage—his talk of it—that seemed to symbolise to Meg all that was wrong in his way of loving.
Puzzling over this, he dropped a quick kiss on her hair, caught the smile on the face of the nurse who walked in at that moment and, uncertain whether to be happy or embarrassed, headed back to his office.
Martin Goodall was coming down the corridor on his way to see Melody, who, in what seemed to be a recurring theme of faulty valves and heart murmurs in Sam’s life these days, had been found to have one. And suddenly Sam remembered a scrap of conversation that had bothered him the last time he’d seen Martin.
‘As well as working for you, was Mum seeing you for her heart?’
Martin was startled but recovered quickly enough.
‘She was. She had a heart murmur. Not bad enough to concern her when she was young but she needed to have regular check-ups.’
Martin bustled away, leaving Sam standing in the corridor.
Heart murmur—leaking valve? Surely he should have known that? Not as a child or teenager, perhaps, but later on—particularly once he’d started studying medicine!
Should she have told him, or should he have asked?
Was this what Meg meant about love not going deep enough?
More confused than ever, he remained where he was, thinking of his mother, of the news he’d heard only three months ago—the news that she’d had heart problems.
Not only heart problems, but a heart so degenerated by the work it had been doing it had been too late for an operation of any kind to save it.
No heroics, his mother had said, but there needn’t have been heroics if she’d been treated earlier.
If he’d known…
‘Taken root there?’ Coralie Stephens came sailing past. ‘How’s our baby? I guess that’s where you’ve been. Word has it you spend almost as much time in there as Meg does. Maybe the two of you should get together.’
The wink she gave told him the news of their relationship was all around the hospital.
He and Meg should get together?
When his mother had had what had most likely been a congenital heart condition and Meg had had a baby with heart problems.
Meg, who wanted children…
Meg, who had already lost one baby…
His car was in its usual position under the house but there was no sign of Sam when Meg came home, piping hot fish and chips calling to her from their wrapping.
He’d be on the beach. She’d take their dinner down there.
She went into her place to get a huge towel to spread on the sand, some wet towelettes for their fingers, and a bottle of cold water. Picnic ready, she made her way down to the beach, seeing a solitary swimmer heading back to shore.
He’d swum straight out?
She couldn’t swear to it. Maybe he’d swum along the shoreline and had just turned to come back before she saw him.
Would she ask?
She didn’t think so. For all their physical closeness there was still constraint hovering just beyond the edges of that togetherness.
‘Fish and chips,’ she called as he stood up and walked out of the water. He hesitated just slightly, then bent to get his towel, giving his body a perfunctory rub before walking towards where she’d spread the blanket.
‘This what you call your turn to cook?’ he said, sitting down but not as close as she’d expected.
‘You know my limit is tinned salmon on toast, though I can do eggs and bacon at a pinch, and have been known to throw together a good salad.’
He smiled, but not a Sam smile that made her heart sing little la, la, la notes up and down the scale.
‘Fish and chips are great beach food,’ he assured her, more Dr Sam than Sam the lover.
‘What is it?’ she asked, poking a chip into her mouth, though she knew she wouldn’t taste its delicious saltiness.
He took her hand, turned it over and pressed a kiss into the palm, carefully folding her fingers over it before he returned it to her lap.
‘Eat your fish and chips first,’ he ordered.
‘First? Eat before you throw some bombshell at me? What are fish and chips supposed to taste like when you’ve said something like that to me?’
This time he took both her hands.
‘I think you’re right about what you call the love thing, Megan,’ he said, his voice sounding so decisive she knew he meant every word. ‘What I feel, for whatever reason, isn’t what you need or deserve. No marriage, no affair, but for friendship’s sake, and because I love you as a friend, go ahead and make arrangements to start uni in the new year—first semester. I’ll fund it—no, you won’t take my money, I know—but there’d be no better use for some of Mum’s money than helping you achieve your dream.’
Meg stared at him, unable to take in the enormity of what had just occurred between them.
‘Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? That’s what you’re saying, Sam?’ The words crept out past strangled vocal cords.
He didn’t answer, just stared out to sea.
She waited, counted waves, counted some more, then picked up a handful of chips and flung them at him, rising to her feet at the same time and racing from the beach.
Across the park, up the hill, panting for breath, running from pain, hating Sam so much she wanted to yell her rage to the sky.
He let her go, the damage done, his own pain suggesting he’d found out exactly what she talked about when she talked of deep-down love.
Benjie came back in for his treatment, and Meg was by his bed, talking to Jenny about Ben’s progress, when the alarm sounded.
The number flashing in the light-box above the door told her it was the nursery, and she knew it would be Melody’s baby.
‘There’s no apparent reason for it,’ Mike Chan was saying to Sam as Meg flew through the door.
She looked around. No crash cart?
‘Y
ou’re not resuscitating?’
She heard the accusation in her voice but couldn’t stop it.
‘We tried, Meg,’ Sam said gently. ‘Fingertip heart massage, oxygen—’
‘That’s all? No drugs? No defibrillation?’
‘She’s less than a week old, Meg. Shocking her isn’t an option. It’s too extreme for a neonate.’ He glanced up at the clock on the wall. ‘Time of death, ten twenty-one a.m.
‘You can’t do that! Just decide like that. We should try again—try drugs. We can’t just give in!’ Bright spots of colour now in Meg’s cheeks, and anguish in her eyes.
Instinct took Sam towards her. He grasped her arm with a firm hand and said, as gently as he could, ‘We can’t save her, Meg.’
The hectic colour faded, leaving her ashen grey, her body shaking as if she was about to collapse. He tightened his hold on her, fearing she’d faint—trying to get her away from the cot, away from the other staff.
But just as quickly as it had ebbed, her strength returned. She straightened, disengaging herself from his hold and walking away.
Acting as if nothing had happened—although her shaking hands gave lie to the pretence.
He caught up with her in the alcove and led her outside into the tropical gardens, to a seat beneath an old fig tree, its drooping branches hiding them from prying eyes.
‘I should be talking to Melody and Mrs Carter,’ she said, her voice muffled by tears. ‘Not falling apart like this.’
‘Mike Chan will talk to them and we’ll see them later.’
She didn’t answer, weeping quietly against his chest while his arms held her close and his head made silent promises he couldn’t—shouldn’t—keep.
At last she straightened, the pale skin blotched and streaked with tears. He took out his handkerchief and wiped it for her, then held her close again, rocking her in his arms.
‘I don’t think I cried for Lucy,’ she whispered. ‘Not properly. I was down in Melbourne on my own. I had to do things, sign things, organise a funeral, so I kept pretending everything was all right and pretending became a habit.’
She looked up and tried a feeble smile.
‘So I guess I didn’t grieve properly either and it was all bottled up inside me just waiting to come flooding out.’
Bride at Bay Hospital Page 15